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“We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.” -- Frank Bruni, professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, in the New York Times, April 20, 2024
Humility is not a word to describe the era we’re living in.
The president has put his face up everywhere in Washington. Odes to himself. You already know this story.
You probably also know social media does not incentive humility. It incentivizes arrogance, performance, self-promotion, and (fake) certitude.
In his column, Frank Bruni gives an example of what not having humility looks like.
The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. But above all, they were un-humble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t accept that their preference for one presidential candidate over another could possibly put them in the minority…
Bruni also provided an example of what humility in civic life looked like.
The campaign for same-sex marriage — one of the most successful social movements of recent decades — showed that progress can be made not by shaming people, not by telling them how awful they are, but by suggesting how much better they could be. Marriage-equality advocates emphasized a brighter future that they wanted to create, not an ugly past that they wanted to litigate.
Mindset Shift
The question is about how to get what you want in civic life. It’s actually not through anger, violence, and unrestrained emotion. It’s through humility—whether innate or simply strategic.